Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have always fascinated me yet I never really understood the inner-workings of this type of analysis and never made the time to dig into the science. Until recently, I didn’t even know that you could collect tweets for free using Twitter’s Search and Streaming APIs. A few days and several blogs later, I’ve now set up R to work with both the Search and Streaming APIs. Since much of the information was located on disparate websites, I thought I’d give a general recap here. This first post deals with using the Twitter Search API and R to collect tweets. Before I dig into the code, there are some notes I want to touch on (which I later learned from Twitter’s documentation). Continue reading…